Ready Player One and the Limits of Name-Checking Nostalgia

As a nerd such as me grows older, it becomes unavoidable that certain things that once felt exhilarating and fresh have since become stale and predictable. Among those faded thrills are the promise of big-budget, special effects-laden fantasy/sci-fi films that are helmed by popular directors. In particular, I'm talking about this weekend's release of Ready Player One, a movie adaptation of a bestselling novel that has been directed by Steven Spielberg.

Yes, Spielberg knows a few things about adapting bestselling novels into blockbuster films (see Jaws and Jurassic Park) and he knows his way around special effects. Yet between the teaser trailers' emphasis on CGI set pieces and the story's widely known reliance on nostalgic references to pop culture, I can't work up much interest (let alone enthusiasm) for Ready Player One. For everything that this film is promising, I can't but to feel that I've seen this done before and done better.

Even though Ready Player One was published back in 2011, it reminds me so much of two recent "toys to life" video games, Lego Dimensions and Disney Infinity. Both of those games mashed together multiple creative licenses into a single video game platform, which subsequently allowed players to combine characters, vehicles and settings from a variety of movies and TV shows into a single setting. The exact legal logic behind these games are different: Lego put together Dimensions by assembling the merchandising licenses it already had in its portfolio (Ghostbusters, Scooby Doo, etc.) while Disney put so many licenses into one game because it owns all of them (Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, etc.).

Ready Action Figure One: A selection of Marvel figures from Disney Infinity.

Yet based on what I read from various reviews, one of the consistent complaints was uninspiring game play. It didn't matter which characters player selected in Lego Dimensions or Disney Infinity; the resulting game play was repetitive and uninteresting. In other words, what made these characters and their franchises interesting on their own disappeared once they became interchangeable components within a video game environment.

This vibe is the same one I'm getting from Ready Player One: What's the point of including so many pop culture icons into a single movie when the very traits that made them icons in the first place are absent? Furthermore, what's the point of setting a movie in the supposedly endless realm of virtual reality (VR) when it's going to be clogged with things we've already seen in so many other movies? From this perspective, it feels like Ready Player One isn't so much a movie as it is a feature-length Freudian slip, mega-sized entertainment companies bragging about their vast inventories of nostalgia-ready franchises under the pretense of producing "popcorn entertainment".

This is not to say that movies, TV shows and video games that are based on older pop culture icons are uniformly bad. It's been my experience that exercises in nostalgia earn their entertainment value when they engage the icons for what they represented, reflect on their contributions to later generations of pop culture, and creatively play with the icons in fun, memorable ways. A good example of this would be Monster Squad, a film that was both a tribute to classic Universal movie monsters and the "monster kid" culture they inspired. Other noteworthy examples would be Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which used the golden age of Hollywood animation as the setting for a witty send up of pulpy detective yarns, and Wreck-It Ralph, which utilized several decades worth of video game history as part of its playful romp through several different kinds of gaming formats.

Classic movie monsters rise again in Monster Squad.

If anyone can appreciate using nostalgia to create something unique, it's Spielberg himself. His Indiana Jones movies are nostalgia for film serials, a kind of motion picture that was made from the silent era up to the 1950s, but his unique approach to that format allowed his films to grow into something that stood apart from the film serials they emulated. I'm willing to wager that most Indiana Jones fans couldn't name even one of the film serials that Spielberg used as his inspiration. This is not an insult aimed at those fans--it's just an observation of how nostalgia can become an act of reinvention when enough creativity and unique thinking are applied to it.

I'm sure that Ready Player One is adequate for the kind of entertainment that Spielberg intends it to be. I just can't help but to think that maybe it would have been a much more ambitious and inventive movie if the nostalgia this film wallows in was part of Spielberg's own childhood.